A US ACADEMIC CLAIMS THAT AN INSTITUTE AT a Singaporean university where he used to work is a “veneer” for government and industry research. Robert Bianchi, who until April was visiting research professor at the Middle East Institute (MEI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), says he was dismissed after speaking out about problems at the institute.
Prof. Bianchi signed a two-year renewable contract at MEI in August 2011. “There is some confusion and misrepresentation of its relationship with the Singapore government, its degree of academic autonomy and the duties of senior faculty,” he told Times Higher Education.
Three of the institute’s nine board members are representatives of the Singapore government, three hold directorships of companies, and the chairman of the board is also the chairman of Shell Companies in Singapore, according to the MEI website. Prof. Bianchi says that people who spoke at the institute during his time there appeared to be “guests of the foreign ministry and government”. “It became more and more apparent that the so-called independent research institute with a scholarly veneer is an arm of the Singapore foreign ministry,” he says.
Prof. Bianchi claims that the early termination of his contract followed “repeated retaliation” for highlighting problems and expressing professional opinions that differed from the institute’s director at the time, Michael Hudson.
In March 2013, after raising issues during a meeting of the institute’s international advisory council, he received a letter from Prof. Hudson reprimanding him for an “angry and erratic tirade” and for “insulting” the institute and its visitors. It listed a further nine alleged incidents of professional misconduct dating back to October 2011. Prof. Bianchi says that the letter was “filled with distortions and absurd allegations that were completely unfounded” and that he was previously unaware of most of the incidents listed.
In February 2014, Prof. Bianchi wrote to members of the NUS senior management and MEI board members expressing concerns about the choice of a successor for Prof. Hudson. He also met with the provost to discuss the matter a few weeks later. By the end of March, he had received a letter terminating his contract.
A spokesman for the university says there is “no truth” in the claim that Prof. Bianchi had been dismissed for expressing professional opinions differing from those of Prof. Hudson. “Prof. Bianchi was released from the MEI… following numerous serious complaints from colleagues as well as the leadership of MEI about his inappropriate conduct,” he maintains.
Competency education attraction
A RECENT REPORT FROM A MANAGEMENT consultancy, McKinsey, titled Education to Employment: Getting Europe’s Youth into Work, paints a dismal picture of the state of vocational education. In four of the seven countries surveyed, more than half of young people taking an academic course said they would have preferred a vocational one. But they had been put off by disorganisation and lack of prestige. Britain has more than 20,000 vocational qualifications offered by 150 different organisations. In America, responsibility is scattered among government departments.
The great exception to this has always been Germany. But now there are signs that other countries are trying to turn back roads into autobahns. Politicians are banging the drum for vocational education. Australia, for example, has created a Workforce and Productivity Agency. Education innovators are flooding the vocational market.
There are good reasons why vocational education should be gaining ground. The world is plagued by youth unemployment. In the EU, about a quarter of 15 to 25-year-olds are jobless. The figure is lower in America (15 percent) but still remarkably high for a country that once prided itself on full employment and a flexible labour market. At the same time, firms complain bitterly about skills shortages: 27 percent of European employers surveyed by McKinsey said they have left a vacancy open in the past year because they couldn’t find anyone with the right attributes; a third said that lack of skills is causing big problems for their businesses.
The university bubble is also beginning to burst. Democratising universities has proved an expensive and inefficient way of providing mass higher education. Americans, who led the way, have taken on more than $1 trillion in student debt. But a growing number think they got poor value for money — taught by Ph D students not professors, forced to subsidise expensive research programmes and administrative cadres, and provided, at the end of it all, with a college degree that no longer automatically brings a desirable job.
“Competency-based education” sounds tedious but reverses most of the basic tenets of academic teaching. It tries to transmit mastery of work-related skills (or “competences”) rather than command of a particular academic discipline. It is designed for a world of lifelong learning rather than the “three or four years and you’re done” university system. Knowledge is broken up into bite-sized ‘modules’. Students take these modules at their own convenience — over months or years, in the evenings or by attending full-time courses -- and combine them in whatever way makes the most sense for their careers. Evaluation is continuous as students master different skills, rather than competence embodied in a single degree certificate: your CV provides a constantly updated summary of the skills that you have acquired.
This mixture of new technology and different methods of teaching is attracting a host of entrants, from universities looking for customers to innovators hoping to create new businesses. Southern New Hampshire University College of America paved the way by offering competency-based degrees for $2,500 a year. Other early adopters include the University of Wisconsin’s UW Flex and Capella University’s FlexPath. Udacity, an online-education firm, has teamed up with companies such as AT&T to provide ‘nano-degrees’: job-related qualifications that can be completed in six to 12 months for $200 a month.
In a new e-book Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, and Michelle Weise of the Christensen Institute, argue that this presages a revolution: students will be able to take courses that provide them with essential skills quickly and cheaply. The great disrupter of higher education will not be Moocs (massive online open courses), they insist: these mostly focus on delivering standard academic education over the internet and suffer from drop-out rates of up to 95 percent. Rather, it will be a new approach to learning which makes plenty of use of the internet but ties education more closely to work.
The emphasis on competences rather than subjects will make vocational education better suited to post-industrial economies. It will also challenge the dominance of universities as students realise that they no longer have to amass huge debts to acquire marketable skills.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education and The Economist)